This is not the first time I’ve talked about a college football coach getting a massive payment for effectively getting fired and asked to not coach his team anymore. The most notable – and largest of these came in 2023 when Texas A&M promised Jimbo Fisher $76 million to go away. That largess will be paid out annually through 2031, so it’s like winning the lottery every year. And that money is guaranteed, even if Fisher were to get another coaching gig. Which he might.
That wouldn’t be the case for the now former head football coach of Penn State James Franklin. Franklin was let go last week after a third consecutive loss, this time to nerdy Big 10 opponent Northwestern. The previous week they lost to a hapless UCLA in one of the year’s biggest upsets, which came after Penn State dropped an overtime home game to Oregon. At that point, the Nitty Lions were ranked third in the country and assumed to be a safe choice to return to the College Football Playoffs, where last year they fell in the second round to Notre Dame. Despite this season being an unmitigated disaster, the team went 34-8 in the prior three seasons and had increasingly made their way to the upper echelon of the Big 10, where seemingly every team starts the year with championship intentions.
But the aggregate doesn’t tell the whole story. Franklin’s demise came from his inability to win against top rated teams, especially in conference. Franklin’s teams went 4-21 against top 10 teams. He was also 1-14 against Ohio State and Michigan, the historical standard bearers of the Big 10. And with teams like Oregon, Washington, and USC making the league even more top heavy, that kind of record was no longer palatable to the Nitty Lion faithful, who probably cheered as much to fire Franklin as they did to score a touchdown. That’s the nature of rabid sports fans. At some point, you actually root for your team to bottom out so you can start all over again.
Of course, this couldn’t have been the feeling all along, at least when the University’s now former athletic director give Franklin a 10-year contract extension with more guarantees than a used car salesman. Only these ones are real. According to the deal, Franklin gets somewhere between 48 and 56 million, depending on what you read, over the next six years – the second biggest college payout ever. There is one caveat here – which is that the contract requires Franklin to look for another job, and when he gets one, Penn State only owes him the difference in salary, if there is one. So, assuming everyone plays by the rules, the total payoff may be considerably lower. All we know for sure is that six years from now, James Franklin will have at least 50 or so million while not coaching the Nittany Lions.
The question here isn’t whether James Franklin was a good coach and whether someone who makes the playoffs one year should be fired the next. All this depends on what metrics you value most. For Penn State, it was not being a constant kid brother to the big kids in the Conference. The question is, knowing you’re likely to fire your coach at some point and the liability is enormous, why sign these absurd contracts in the first place. It’s hard enough for the average person to understand paying a college coach over $5 million a year – especially if you happen to be paying tuition at the time. It’s way harder to understand why the deal would give such power to the employee. Universities are famous for guaranteed contracts – see tenure – but this takes it to the extreme.
The answer, at least in recent years, was that this was the market they were playing in. And if Penn State didn’t make that deal, someone else would. Maybe that’s still true. But unlike only a few years ago, universities have a whole new set of financial conditions. Like paying college athletes. And a population cliff for student enrollment. And that’s assuming you don’t lose your money to the federal government. Where once it was somewhat justifiable, I guess, to sign these kinds of deal, it’s starting to feel absurd.
Will college athletic programs make a collective pivot to reduce the buyout clause for coaches. Meaning, they’ll prioritize fiscal safeguards over a price war. Well, it would probably be the first time. Regardless, it’s certainly too late for Penn State.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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